Les Murray

The Shading Out of Poetry by Deadline

From our UK edition

Like old-time washerwomen floodwater is sousing trees and shrubs out on the drainage. Floating wrack dribbles seaward from their labour. Last time rains poured day and night in this way, the country was refilling after years of drought. This deluge spreads mirror over roads. Human effort gets its pages turned and blanked under microgroove and parchment is how media display our towns. Tornado, tsunami are words we hear at home, that were exotic in teapot times. Downpour and inferno are states that people drive between, discarding their senators and whitegoods. Global warming’s chiller wintertimes rule both hemispheres. Arizona snow golf, Siberian wheat, English vineyards stricken by blizzard in their chardonnay.

Money and the Flying Horses

From our UK edition

Intriguing, the oaten seethe of thoroughbred horses in single stalls across a twilit cabin. Intimate, under the engines’ gale, a stamped hoof, a loose-lip sigh, like dawn sounds at track work. Pilots wearing the bat wings of intercontinental night cargo come out singly, to chat with or warn the company vet at his manifests: four to Dubai, ten from Shannon, Singapore, sixteen, sweating their nap. They breed in person, by our laws: halter-snibbed horses, radiating over the world. Under half-human names, they run in person. We dress for them, in turn. Our officer class fought both of its world wars in riding tog: Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht in their jodhpur pants.